On 8/4/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
I think it's reasonable to distinguish people who do X for a living, but have chosen to do X for free for us, and people who do Y for a living, but have chosen to do X as a hobby. In some ways it's a much greater sacrifice for a professional to work for free.
I don't necessarily disagree, but this does ride the line between "thanking someone for professional-grade work" and "valuing someone for their accreditation as a proxy for valuing their content". If that makes sense.
More pragmatically, amateurs don't need much encouragement to work for us. I contribute photos to Wikipedia because I enjoy it, and because I want to - not for any kind of recognition. Also, since "amateurs" are Wikipedia community members, there are other ways of recognising them internally - talk page messages work well. "Professionals" come from outside the Wikipedia community, so should be recognised in a more external way.
Just the same, we want to make sure we don't end up looking like we undervalue "amateur" contributions either, since they no doubt make up the bulk of our contributions. Making a big hub-bub because someone is willing to donate the scraps of their day-job to Wikipedia might rub some the wrong way, if you get what I'm saying.
Again, I don't necessarily disagree that there aren't reasons to encourage professionals, I'm just saying it's something I'd want to tread carefully when it comes to even "expressing gratitude". A lot of contributors here are very anti-authority (in a broad sense, not just in the limited sense of state power) and one of the key aspects of Wikipedia's content model is that you don't need any sort of accreditation to participate.
That being said, there would be advantages to emphasizing professional contributions as well. Aside from potentially attracting people who can contribute very high quality content without much difficulty, it could also raise the status of Wikipedia in the professional world (I've seen lots of discussions between academics where they deride Wikipedia's content as "amateur hour" without knowing that lots of academics contribute to Wikipedia).
Though as we all know just because someone is professional does not make them a good contributor (in the case of academics, it may just encourage them to throw their hands up and say "I'm sick of arguing with these idiots! Don't they know I'm a professor?", which I've seen happen a few times. That's not meant to be an anti-academic comment, but I think that most academics don't spend very much time trying to explain themselves to people outside of their specific disciplines, are not used to people challenging their authority or doubting what is considered in their line of work to be a basic fact, and as a consequence don't deal with "free for all" settings like Wikipedia very well), and we should not hold our breath for the majority professionals to endorse Wikipedia (it will never really happen, not as long as "edit this page" remains).
FF